This is why gatekeeping is important and shouldn't be labeled as toxic. There's been a shift where everyone wants to welcome everyone, but the problem is it erodes your company culture and lowers the average quality.
This is why gatekeeping is important and shouldn't be labeled as toxic. There's been a shift where everyone wants to welcome everyone, but the problem is it erodes your company culture and lowers the average quality.
I've lately become a pretty big proponent of gatekeeping. On Reddit I saw a comment that security flaws are simply unavoidable, that they're inevitable because as a web developer they must have 1000 dependencies and cannot verify the security of them all, and that if something goes wrong, there's no way it would be fair to hold them accountable for it. When that kind of mindset has taken root, and it has deeply taken root in the entire Javascript ecosystem, it becomes a real-world security issue that affects millions of people detrimentally. Maybe software development doesn't actually need to be accessible to people who can't write their own IsOdd function.
Another example is that a hobby I loved is now dead to me for lack of gatekeeping; Magic the Gathering. Wizards of the Coast started putting out products that were not for their core playerbase, and when players complained, were told "these products are not for you; but you should accept that because there's no harm in making products for different groups of people". That seems fair enough on its face. Fast forward a couple of years, and Magic's core playerbase has been completely discarded. Now Magic simply whores itself out to third party IPs; this year we'll get or have gotten Final Fantasy, Spiderman, Spongebob Squarepants, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card sets. They've found it more lucrative in the short-term to tap into the millions of fans of other media franchises while ditching the fanbase that had played Magic for 30 years. "This product is not for you" very rapidly became "this game is not for you", which is pretty unpleasant for people who've been playing it for most or all of their lives.
I played MTG on and off for decades, and the Final Fantasy pre-release was one of the best experiences I’ve had in the community. I met several people who had played MTG and stopped but went back for that set because they loved FF. Plus, it fits. For fans of both franchises, seeing how they ported mechanics was itself part of the fun. Sure, maybe a Spongebob set is weird, but FF felt like a labor of love in many areas.
Also, it became the best selling set of all time even before it was out. Which isn’t an indicator of quality, for sure, but it does show Wizards understands something about their market.
If it were simply that, it would have been fine, sure. I didn't especially hate the LOTR crossover either. There was absolutely room for Magic to have, say, one crossover set a year with a fitting fantasy franchise. I'm not saying a crossover is inherently poison that instantly kills a game. What many established players do hate, and what made me understand the game is not for me anymore, is that they broke their promise for these cards to be segregated from regular play, that they started printing more advertisement crossovers than real cards, that these crossovers became less and less appropriate to a fantasy game setting to the point that said setting is completely gone now, and that they started bastardizing even the regular sets (Edge of Eternities is technically not a crossover, but it does not feel like a real Magic set either and clearly only exists to lay down a gameplay framework for the upcoming Star Trek set).
I'm not sure Wizards does understand their market. As you noted, a set doing numbers pre-release has absolutely nothing to do with its quality; it just means there are a lot of Final Fantasy fans interested in collecting cards. But this is not necessarily sustainable for another 30 years, because those Final Fantasy fans are not necessarily going to stick around for Spiderman, and Spiderman fans are not necessarily going to stick around for Spongebob. The Spiderman set was already such a massive flop that they were trying to identify and blame which content creators/streamers were responsible for negatively influencing public opinion, as though that couldn't have happened organically.
WotC is also just about the most incompetent company in the world when it comes to maintaining customer goodwill lately. D&D 5e still, 10 years on, has no real mechanical depth to character building. There's all the identity politics stuff which is needlessly divisive (such as trying to remove "races" and racial bonuses from new D&D rules because it's not PC). They tried to pull that stunt with the OGL where they tried to alter the deal after the fact because the terms weren't to some bean counter's liking. They sent the fucking Pinkertons to raid a guy's house because he got his hands on a prerelease MTG thing through no shenanigans of his own.
At this point, I'm done with WotC. The Pinkerton thing was by far the worst and what made me turn my back forever. Bad rulesets or design designs with which I disagree are one thing, but I refuse to do business with a company that thinks it's acceptable to use force to try to bully people into sticking to their release schedules. They can pound sand forever.
I'm personally failing to see how "welcoming everyone" directly correlates to a company neglecting polish and detail. A cynical read of your comment is that DEI-style programs are lowering standards when, in actuality, the issue most likely lies in poor management and a corporate structure that rewards buzzy work over polished work. I'm not saying that was your implication, by the way; just that "everything's bad because we allowed other people to join" is a slippery slope.
To further your point. In our bodies we have organs which are made up of specific kinds of cells. In some cases diversity of cells seems to come with health benefits (e.g. our guts), but in most cases cause significant health issues. (If you have a bunch of liver cells in your lungs it's probably going to be a problem). Also across the whole body there is an incredible diversity of cells, and they cooperate with mind boggling harmony.
My take away is that diversity at a global level, and in some specific contexts, is a great thing. But diversity in some other specific contexts is entirely destructive and analogous to rot or decomposition.
When we rely on a core societal function (firefighting, accounting, waterworks maintenance, property rights, etc.) the people responsible for maintaining these functions need to maintain in themselves a set of core characteristics (values as patterns of action), and there is room to play outside of those cores, but those cores shouldn't be jeopardized as a tradeoff for diversity and inclusion.
For example, if constructive core values of a railroad system is consistency and reliability, then these shouldnt be diminished in the name of diversity and inclusion, but if diversity and inclusion can be achieved secondarily without a tradeoff (or even to somehow further amplify the core values) then it is constructive. One has to thoughtfully weigh the tradeoffs in each context, and ensure that the most important values in that context to maintain the relevant function are treated as most important. The universe seems to favor pragmatism over ideology, at least in the long run.
So in a company if the core values that make it successful are diluted in exchange for diversity, it's no longer what it was, and it might not be able to do keep doing what it did. That said, it also might have gained something else. One thing diversity tends to offer huge complex systems is stability, especially when its incorporated into other values and not held up singularily.
In other words, my take on diversity (and by extension, inclusion) is that we need a diversity of diversity. Sometimes a lot of diversity is best, and sometimes very little diversity is best.
Your logic could be sound if the lowest rung of the skill ladder was simply inevitable for everyone who is currently there. But that is wrong and, really, makes no sense. Many people are just young and need to be trained. Others were taught bad practices and need to be re-trained. Still others have their priorities wrong, but could do good work if they were given a reason to care about the right things. It also takes time for people to grow and to change and to learn from their mistakes.
If you take a hardline attitude on keeping the gates up, you're just going to end up with a monoculture that stagnates.
This implies that no young people can get past the gate.
Sure, they lack wisdom, but that doesn't mean they aren't smart, it just means they're young.
Gatekeeping doesn't have to mean "Don't hire anyone under 35" it means "Don't hire people who are bozos" and "don't hire people who don't give a shit"
Obviously you should set standards for your company. I’m not saying just hire anyone and be done with it. But I am saying that hiring is a long-term project. And I am saying that many people could meet your standards if you meet them half-way by giving them all of the information they need, holding their hand a bit at the beginning, and giving them time to figure everything out.
I’ve worked at places that have the opposite philosophy - hire quickly and fire quickly. That works in terms of hiring people who already happen to be what you want them to be. It just leaves no room for anyone who could be, but isn’t yet, what you want them to be. It also leaves no room for anyone who is different from what you are looking for but who could still bring a lot to the table if you just take the time to figure out what that is, which I think describes a lot of people. You might have hired a mediocre programmer who would be a rockstar at documentation, for example. That kind of thing happens all the time, yet workplace culture and practices tend not to accommodate that. By all means have standards, but put in some effort to help your people reach them in their own way.
But do monocultures always stagnate?
If Apple was made up of only top-end engineers led by a quality-obsessed maniac, would they put out better or worse products?
Of course, not everyone can follow this philosophy, but they don't have to, and most don't want to anyway.
Monocultures can avoid stagnating if they occasionally accept fresh blood from the outside. But hardline stances don’t allow for that. My point is, even if you only want to work with the best of the best, and you’re willing to ignore underprivileged groups with tons of potential, you still need an on-ramp if you want it to be sustainable.
The great engineers don’t graduate from college knowing everything they need to know, nor are they born with that knowledge. It takes time and help from other people to get them there. Even if they were already a top performing engineer at Netflix, that doesn’t mean they can smoothly transition into a role at your company and perform well with zero assistance. The on-ramp matters and has a huge impact on how they will perform. Some people will require more investment than others, but that’s true regardless of whether you stubbornly try to maintain your existing monoculture. And I firmly believe that everyone brings something different to the table. It’s mostly a matter of figuring out what that is for each person.
Hard agree. Gatekeeping is a good thing. It is how you ensure that people who join a group are actually a good fit for the group. For example, if someone wants to join a D&D group but doesn't like that the game is a dungeon crawl where you just go kick monster ass without a pretense of story, nobody will be served by the group deciding to try to adjust to welcome the new person despite that bad fit. Not only the existing group, but the prospective new member, will be better off if they each go their separate ways and play the type of game each enjoys.
It's good to not exclude people for arbitrary reasons (though even this requires the caveat that one man's "arbitrary" is another man's "important part of our identity"). But we also need to recognize that it's ok for something to not be everyone's cup of tea. There isn't some kind of moral mandate that everything must be maximally welcoming to all. Unfortunately, we don't recognize that in our current culture, and in fact we stigmatize it as "gatekeeping" which is deemed to be toxic. But the culture is wrong about this.
Virtually no one is pushing to welcome people who are not qualified.
This is a huge misunderstanding at best and a malicious re-framing of serious issues within portions of the tech industry at worst.
Virtually everyone is pushing to welcome people who are demonstrably not qualified.
This is so off from my experience in the world I think we may be talking about entirely different situations.
In what context is virtually everyone pushing to hire demonstrably unqualified people?
Literally every single one. This country has been tearing itself apart with how divisive DEI and "targets" for hiring are.
> Virtually no one is pushing to welcome people who are not qualified
Any time anyone is celebrated for being an X in this role rather than being good at the role, this is being pushed for.
>This is why gatekeeping is important and shouldn't be labeled as toxic.
I do not for the life of me understand your point. Gatekeeping, as its most commonly used, means controlling access to something (be it a resource, information etc) to deliberately and negatively affect others that are not part of a "blessed" group. Its not objective, and certainly is not a practice reliant on merit. Its an artificial constraint applied selectively at the whim of the gatekeeper(s).
>There's been a shift where everyone wants to welcome everyone, but the problem is it erodes your company culture and lowers the average quality.
The first assertion and the second one are not related. Being welcoming to everyone is not the same thing as holding people to different standards. Company culture sets company inertia and how employees are incentivized to behave and what they care about. You can have the most brilliant engineers in the world, like Google most certainly does have its fair share, and as we have seen, with the wrong incentives it doesn't matter. Look at Google's chat offerings, the Google Graveyard, many of their policies becoming hostile to users as time goes on etc.
Yet you can have a company with what you may deem "average quality" but exceeds in its business goals because its oriented its culture to do so. I don't think Mailchimp was ever lauded for its engineering talent like Google has been, for example, but they dominated their marketplace and built a really successful company culture, at least before the Intuit acquisition.
Agree.
I was in a (tech) meetup last week. We meet regularly, we are somewhere between acquaintances and friends. One thing that came up was a very candid comment about how "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid' whenever the situation warrants it".
I believe that does more good than harm, even to the person it is being directed to. It is a nice covenant to have, "we'll call you on your bs whenever you bring it in", that's what a good friend would do. Embracing high standards in a community makes everyone in it better.
The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus. Some contexts do and must require a high level of expertise before you can collaborate properly in them.
If you are a highly accomplished, highly respected individual (like Linus Torvalds) telling someone 'that is just stupid' can be effective, because most people will instinctively trust that you have a good reason to say this and are probably correct.
But that's a special case, not a usual one. Unfortunately, quite a lot of people say things are stupid when they don't understand them (often because of an inflated sense of their own expertise). If they can politely explain why they think an idea is bad, they are more likely to be listened to, and they can save face if the other person successfully counters their argument.
Bottom line is, if you go around calling ideas stupid you better make damn sure you're never wrong, otherwise, well... that's just stupid :)
One thing is Linus held out against the C++ crap all the way until Rust became a viable alternative.
I wish he'd bless a certain Linux distro for PCs so we can have some default. Current default is kinda Ubuntu, but they've made some weird decisions in the past. Seems like he'd make reasonable choices and not freak out over pointless differences like systemd.
(Like, the default distro shouldn't randomly change its entire GUI twice)
>One thing that came up was a very candid comment about how "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid'
You can tell someone their idea is substandard without inferring their stupid, which is generally taken to be an insult. Tact in communication does matter. I don't think anyone needs to say "that is just stupid" to get a point across.
I've had plenty of tough conversations with colleagues where it was paramount to filter through ideas, and determining viable ones was really important. Not once did anyone have to punch at someone's intelligence to make the point. Even the simple "Thats a bad idea" is better than that.
>whenever the situation warrants it
Which will of course be up to interpretation by just about everyone. Thats the problem with so called "honest"[0] conversation. By using better language you can avoid this problem entirely without demeaning someone. Communication is a skill that be learned.
>The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus. Some contexts do and must require a high level of expertise before you can collaborate properly in them.
Linus took a sabbatical in 2018 to work on his communication and lack of emotional empathy. He's had to make changes or he absolutely risked losing the respect of his peers and others he respected. He has worked on improving his communication.
To follow Linus as an example, would be to work on communication and emotional empathy. Not disregard your peers.
[0]: Most often, I find people who are adamant about this line of thinking tend to want an excuse to be rude without accountability.
Sometimes, people do need a metaphorical kick in the butt though. Of course, that doesn't mean behaving like a jerk, and certainly not on a regular basis, but if you value politeness and conflict avoidance over avoiding actual problems, the culture in your environment will quickly deteroriate towards no one taking responsibility for anything. Why would anyone do that if they can't even be called out for messing something up, yet alone being held accountable?
In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap, not much usually gets done. This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop.
And even if you don't agree with what I'm saying here, "avoid criticising people" quickly turns into "avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket and the product would be greatly improved.
>politeness and conflict avoidance over avoiding actual problems
Those two things are not coupled. You can maintain a sense of politeness in face of conflict. This is the entire basis of Nonviolent Communication, a great book about handling and resolving conflict in such a manner.
It’s extremely effective in my experience and results in overall better clarity and less conversational churn.
>Why would anyone do that if they can't even be called out for messing something up, yet alone being held accountable
You can be, that is in part a definition of accountability and you’re conflating a lack of accountability with some idea that it requires behaving in a manner that may be construed as rude, and that’s simply not true.
So like anything, you hold them accountable. You can do that without being rude.
>In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap
I’m getting a sense you have a predisposition to disliking these things. They’re really important because they are, when correctly understood, results oriented. It frees up people to feel comfortable saying things they may not have been otherwise. That is very productive.
Abusive and abrasion language does not do that.
>This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop
No, in my experience and many reports from others you get this for a myriad of reasons, but consistent theme is lack of ownership or organizational politics, not because people level up their communication skills
>avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket
I don’t disagree with you because I don’t believe in proper criticism, I do. I disagree with you because the implicit messaging I’m getting here is the following
- you sometimes have to be a jerk
- therefore it’s okay to be a jerk sometimes
- somehow having an expectation of treating others with respect somehow equates to poor accountability
I’ve spent a good chunk of my years learning a lot about effective communication and none of it is about avoiding accountability, of yourself or others. It’s about respecting each other and creating an environment where you can talk about tough things and people are willing to do it again because they were treated respectfully
>you’re conflating a lack of accountability with some idea that it requires behaving in a manner that may be construed as rude, and that’s simply not true.
Yes, I'm conflating that. Maybe the two aren't intrinstically coupled, but from what I have seen, that seems to happen. When you forbid surface-level aggression, people don't stop being aggressive or frustrated. They just turn to more underhanded ways of aggression, like bullying or gaslighting.
>I’m getting a sense you have a predisposition to disliking these things. They’re really important because they are, when correctly understood, results oriented. It frees up people to feel comfortable saying things they may not have been otherwise. That is very productive.
I see what you're saying, but I do not think this plays out in practice like that. It's not results-oriented thinking when you prioritise how the other person feels above all. Not to say you should never prioritise it (that's called sociopathy), but if you prioritise it too much, you can say less things, not more, because disagreeing with someone always carries the risk of offence, especially if you are going to say that their idea isn't the best. If you nurture a culture of honesty - and that does not include being abusive - then people will feel free to push back on bad ideas, and that is results-oriented thinking.
>I disagree with you because the implicit messaging I’m getting here is the following
The first two points absolutely, but I would like to push back on the third point. Not every idea deserves respect and hell, not everyone deserves respect either! It is the hollowing out of what the word originally meant. Ideally, you only respect people who deserve respect, who return it to you in turn. To be respected is a honour, not a right, because it carries implicit trust in your words. If you consistently have a negative impact on the environment, I do not think it is a reasonable expectation to continue to treat you with respect, because that wastes everyone's time.
If something needs to be said then it must be said, but you have a higher likelihood of the other person receiving the message if you drop the aggressive tone. You're also investing in them listening to you in the future, as opposed to avoiding you because you have a tendency to shame them for being wrong on something.
And if someone "consistently has a negative impact on the environment" you can still confront them without being abrasive. They can still be fired without calling them stupid. Adding that kind of tone adds no information except that you lost your cool. You're making it sound like every instance that warrants confrontation is about an intentional and repeated offence.
I've been in social circles where one can just say "that is just stupid" without that being a big deal, as well as others where people tend to write essays like yours to get a simple argument across.
I prefer the former by a lot, but of course you're free to spend your time in the latter.
> You can tell someone their idea is substandard without inferring their stupid, which is generally taken to be an insult. Tact in communication does matter. I don't think anyone needs to say "that is just stupid" to get a point across.
What's wrong with calling an idea stupid? A smart person can have stupid ideas. (Or, more trivially, the person delivering a stupid idea might just be a messenger, rather than the person who originally thought of the idea.)
Though, to be clear, saying that an idea is stupid does carry the implication that someone who often thinks of such ideas is, themselves, likely to be stupid. An idea is not itself a mind that can have (a lack of) intelligence; so "that's stupid" does stand for a longer thought — something like "that is the sort of idea that only a stupid person would think of."
But saying that an idea is stupid does not carry the implication that someone is stupid just for providing that one idea. Any more than calling something you do "rude" when you fail to observe some kind of common etiquette of the society you grew up in, implies that you are yourself a "rude person". One is a one-time judgement of an action; the other is a judgement of a persistent trait. The action-judgements can add up as inductive evidence of the persistent trait; but a single action-judgement does not a trait-judgement make.
---
A philosophical tangent:
But what both of those things do — calling an idea stupid, or an action rude — is to attach a certain amount of social approbation or shame to the action/idea, beyond just the amount you'd feel when you hear all the objective reasons the action/idea is bad. Where the intended response to that "communication of shame" is for the shame to be internalized, and to backpropagate and downweight whatever thinking process produced the action/idea within the person. It's intended as a lever for social operant conditioning.
Now, that being said, some people externalize blame — i.e. they experience "shaming messaging" not by feeling shame, but by feeling enraged that someone would attempt to shame them. The social-operant-conditioning lever of shame does not work on these people. Insofar as such people exist in a group, this destabilizes the usefulness of shame as a tool in such a group.
(A personal hypothesis I have is that internalization of blame is something that largely correlates with a belief in an objective morality — and especially, an objective morality that can potentially be better-known/understood by others than oneself. And therefore, as Western society has become decreasingly religious, shame as a social tool has "burned out" in how reliably it can be employed in Western society in arbitrary social contexts. Yet Western society has not adapted fully to this shift yet; which is why so many institutions that expect shame to "work" as a tool — e.g. the democratic system, re: motivating people to vote; or e.g. the school system, re: bullying — are crashing and burning.)
In addition to what you and the person you replied to already said, simply calling something stupid conveys very little information. "Stupid" provides no context, no rationale, and no direction towards improvement. If your goal is simply to push someone away, stop them from communicating entirely, or shame them, then yeah, dismissing a person's contributions as stupid is the tool for the job. But if you want better contributions and are trying to improve a project, you have to put in more effort than that.
> "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid' whenever the situation warrants it".
The likeliest outcome from that is the other person gets defensive and everything stays the same or gets worse. It’s not difficult to learn to be tactful in communication in a way which allows you to get your point across in the same number of words and makes the other person thankful for the correction.
Plus, it saves face. It’s not that rare for someone who blatantly say something is stupid to then be proven wrong. If you’re polite and reasonable about it, when you are wrong it won’t be a big deal.
One thing I noticed about people who pride themselves in being “brutally honest” is that more often than not they get more satisfaction from being brutal than from being honest, and are incredibly thin-skinned when the “honest brutality” is directed at them.
> The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus.
I don’t understand why people keep using Torvalds as an example/excuse to be rude. Linus realised he had been a jerk all those years and that that was the wrong attitude. He apologised and vowed to do better, and the sky hasn’t fallen nor has Linux turned to garbage.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...
So the problem is actually diversity and not grotesque shareholder and marketing driven development?
Im sceptical. I've never seen what you describe outside of toxic "culture war clickbait videos", what i have seen is nepotism, class privileges and sprint culture pushed by investors - you know the exact opposite of what you describe.
Toxic gatekeeping means sitting on IRC all day just to tell people to read the manual. What you're describing is an, "intervew process."
Idk how to fix this, but the problem with interviews by rank and file employees is they have to prioritize standardization and objectivity over finding brilliant applicants. It only makes sure the applicant knows how to code rather than lying on his/her resume. I think Jobs said something like, B players will hire B and C players.
When I interviewed at a smaller company, someone high up interviewed me last. I passed everything on paper afaik, but he didn't think I was the right person for some reason. Which is fine for a small company.
You’re right. I’ll start: get off hacker news you noob. Nobody wants to hear your Eternal September rants about what you think DEI means.